Bishop: Trump for President

Thursday, September 29, 2016

Brian Bishop, GoLocalProv Guest MINDSETTER™

For many weeks of the year, we write about policy choices in Rhode Island, but it is the time of year that politics choices are on everyone’s mind . . . well most everyone. It still isn’t necessarily in everyone’s rational interest to invest heavily in assessing political choices and carrying through with democratic participation when they consider how much their single vote matters against all others. It takes more than just the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November in a leap year to get people off the couch.

The 2008 presidential election was notable for the new voters that Barack Obama inspired, many young Americans who might not otherwise have bothered. I know conservatives who thought the energy of his campaign distinguishing; and the tired status quo character of the Republican campaign actually turned some of them into Obama voters.

I don’t think they believed that Obama had conservative instincts, but the novel energy he brought to the election commanded a willingness in some on the right to accept the promise of hope and change as a worthy aspiration. This cohort is oft disregarded in our public discourse with the media favoring a narrative of racist discontent with Obama’s presidency.

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Racism and the presidency

Supposedly it is this racist animus that kept alive the birther movement that questioned Obama’s credentials. The birthers in Hillary’s camp were discrete enough to drop it once it could offer her no electoral advantage while the Donald, infamously, pursued it out of principle.

I always thought there were more relevant questions to ask of the Obama presidency: whether he deserved to get a Noble Peace Prize just for getting elected? It doesn’t take racism but simply hindsight to wonder if this didn’t reflect any accomplishment of Obama, but rather the pinnacle of the orgy of Bush hating -- that such a prize could have been awarded someone who had had literally no role whatsoever in world affairs and whose sole claim to effect on the world stage was to have supplanted George W Bush.

Now, in the greatest of ironies, it is Donald Trump who has brought a neglected constituency back into the electoral fold – his campaign having been the catalyst for turning out more voters in the Republican primaries than ever before in history. But the hope and change promised by Donald Trump, in the view of media elites, appeals to white trash and is not worthy of the fawning fascination rendered unto Obama’s version.

Playing to the White Trash vote?

This is, however, the great difficulty that Trump’s opponents, Republicans and Democrats have had in blunting his effectiveness with voters.  In painting Trump’s often half formed notions as outside acceptable discourse, they have made the Donald a champion of a vast dispossessed class described by Charles Murray in his recent work Coming Apart. 

From his first traction in the campaign it appeared as if Trump was speaking on behalf of a growing cohort who may be indirect beneficiaries of globalization but who are its direct victims -- as manufacturing jobs are offshored and service jobs are filled with immigrant labor. Those of us with libertarian propensities, Murray included, imagine these phenomenon to be beneficial in the aggregate, providing cheaper goods and services overall, but amongst lower skilled individuals, the pronounced lack of opportunity for solid middle class alternatives to manufacturing jobs contributes far more to despair and disenfranchisement than the perception of how much CEOs make.

Thus it is not at all surprising that a rich shyster can command the allegiance of a class whom Democrats have so long tried instead to inspire with envy of such figures.  Displaced workers don’t expect to all become wealthy magnates, and have no want to tear them down either. They want a pathway to dignified work and favor policies that place their interests as working Americans, not wards of the state, before other efforts to minister to the world and to the latest domestic influx of economic or geopolitical migrants.

And, much to the chagrin of the Clinton campaign, poor blacks and latinos can find common interest with poor whites in some of the prescriptions that Trump offers. They might divide on issues like Black Lives Matter, a mistake in the opinion of Brown economist Glenn Loury who has pointed out that social science suggests whites of the sort Murray depicts, who are in circumstances that invite tense interaction with the police, fare no better than anyone else. But when it comes to jobs and the economy, Trump’s protectionism, while not theoretically ideal, may be the art of the deal for his election.

Affordable Energy the most important domestic issue of the election

Democrats, of course, dismiss Donald Trump’s economic notions as not redistributive enough in tendency, but many wonkish Republicans, myself included, know that his corporatist tendencies, favoring economic eminent domain and public private partnerships are not sound business models, and are an extravagant and inefficient way of producing jobs.

But outweighing this, Donald Trump is the only candidate for President who seems to recognize that the working poor need cheap energy not green energy. That is perhaps the single most important economic sector in a nation that has become the world’s leading producer of fossil fuels, and fueled our economic rebound from the great recession in the process. Despite his efforts to the contrary, this private sector energy boon literally bought the second Obama term with the very fracking folks so loudly decry.

But it is awfully easy to descend into pointless arguments about mixes of policy, about what candidate better understands the Constitution, about ‘presidential temperament’ (is Donald calling a girl who ascended to her place based on looks fat or Hillary hurling ash trays and smashing cellphones a better guide on that?).

Trump promises to oil the works of constitutional checks and balances

The real hope of a Trump presidency would be the constitutional realization that the President does not make policy, Congress does.  Trump’s election will give us divided government by definition, regardless of what party controls Congress. Congressional leaders of both parties have expressed an unwillingness for him to have his way outside the bounds of conventional policy. There is perhaps no other person who could occupy the office of President and find themselves on the losing side of a battle over the pursestrings with Congress.

Sadly, in every skirmish of this sort in modern history, the President has only to send the rangers (Smokey Bear type, that is, not the army) to put padlocks on the national parks. Then the collective wailing of a populous that can endure not the least privation in pursuit even of its own interests rises to such cacophony that Congress throws in the towel. This, coupled with a string of Presidents who have seen fit to create or ignore law without resort to Congress to see the changes properly made, has grossly overexpanded the proper sphere of presidential power. Donald Trump is the only man whose mercurial tendencies actually promise to see that power put back in Pandora’s box. Not because he will be a bad president, but because the Congress and the courts will be on guard against any overreach and can muster great public concern behind their efforts.

How’s foreign policy from the ‘best and brightest’ working out for you? 

Of course that leaves the sphere of national security that is more heavily consigned to the President. Here the notions that expertise and experience should be the watchword of the electorate are hardly common wisdom. We’ve just had what was purported to be the smartest administration in years preside over a fake rapprochement with Iran, perpetuate the neo-con vision of the Arab spring bringing us more conflict and terrorism, that which they were to vanquish after the ‘dumb’ W. And they managed to start another cold war on the side.

I’ll give the Donald the benefit of the doubt over a few feckless conciliatory remarks to Putin. They could hardly outweigh what was given away with such great dignity to Iran in the pivot to the Shia. Thus we funded our own opposition in Syria while maintaining an ineffectual and vacillating support for Sunni insurgents, further pitting ourselves against the Soviets whose Ukranian ambitions confound (and yet by many accounts, as kleptocracies go, the Ukrainians have the Russians beat hands down).

Obama and Hillary were hardly dealt an easy hand but they played it terribly. I’m for some stupider leadership, or at least markedly less elite, that recognizes the need for a pox on all these houses rather than constantly picking sides. That isn’t a withdrawal from the world but a recognition that many of these battles have no good guys, and what turn out to be actual good deeds on our part will seldom go unpunished. Of course we should still have the courage to do good, but we should also have the courage to admit that ,much of the time, we can’t tell what the good is. 

Your vote counts

I pray, although doubt, Donald Trump may prove a Trumanesque President, but I am not the least suspicious that his Presidency would prove more problematic for America’s place in the world than the most recent effort. While the alternative of choosing the Libertarian ticket might seem attractive in a state like ours, once thought sure to go to Hillary, polls suggest that the same phenomenon experienced elsewhere is at work in Rhode Island. Trump will fare better here than previous Republican candidates.

And, while I believe in the electoral college, I believe the national popular vote matters and that our presidential races have not entered the parliamentary age of multiple parties. The mandate will flow by comparing the vote for the top two candidates, not by demonstrating that the winning candidate got less votes than all the others combined (see Rhode Island’s last gubernatorial election).

The alternative is that Hilary be elected and there is a collective sigh of relief among the elites of the sort that bequeathed that ill-considered Noble Prize to Barack Obama. She will know no limit in unleashing a consequentially unrestrained power in the presidency that would make Obama’s (and Bush’s) arrogations of executive power seem like small change, while Donald Trump would be the President most checked by the other branches of government in our history. Donald Trump for President.

 

Brian Bishop is on the board of OSTPA and has spent 20 years of activism protecting property rights, fighting overregulation and perverse incentives in tax policy. 

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Related Slideshow: Trump Rally in Warwick Rhode Island, April, 2016

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